Building the Right Marketing Team to Win

Marketing Director, Marketing Manager, Chief Marketing Officer, Marketing Coordinator, Marketing Specialist – all marketing roles you’ve either served in or heard of, but have you ever thought about how they fit together to build an effective marketing team? Unfortunately, many organizations haven’t thought strategically about this, and they then don’t build the optimal team to help them achieve their business and marketing objectives. Moreover, in many cases they only see marketing as an executional vs. a strategic function, understaff or have less experienced junior marketing people leading the team, and then management wonders why marketing “didn’t work”.

Different Objectives Can Create Confusion

Before thinking about building your team, it’s important to be aligned on the objectives for your marketing function, as marketing objectives are very different from overall business objectives, which are also different from sales objectives.

The following grid outlines typical marketing, business and sales objectives; Since the language used to define success by the overall company vs. marketing vs. sales are so different, it’s easy to see why there often is confusion or a lack of alignment across the organization.

Marketing and sales must be aligned, and each function needs to understand that these objectives matter. Sales won’t increase in the medium and longer term without strong brand performance (awareness, consideration and preference) that builds over time. Importantly though, marketing can also support short term sales objectives by enhancing conversion of lead generation marketing support.

As we indicated earlier, while marketing has an important role in the sales process, particularly in a B2B organization, one of marketing’s most vital roles is to build a strong and enduring brand. Over time, a strong brand should be one of an organization’s most valuable assets that can help attract new customers – remember the phrase “nobody got fired for choosing IBM”? – and creates brand loyalty among current customers (does anyone dispute that loyalty to the Apple brand / ecosystem is off the charts?). The road to creating a strong and enduring brand requires a variety of marketing disciplines and skills, such as “brand marketers” or “top of funnel marketers” – for example, professionals who execute SEO or organic social programs, or create compelling content – to build brand awareness and consideration, and “performance marketers” – for example, professionals who execute paid search and social on-line advertising programs to drive or support lead generation and conversion efforts. And it’s important that there be a highly skilled Chief Market Officer (CMO) or VP of Marketing who has deep experience at leading a marketing team made up of a variety of skills and expertise.

Don’t Skimp When Building Your Team

While most organizations have a “C-Suite” – CFO and COO (or President) –many don’t elevate marketing to that level. Building a strong marketing team requires having a CMO at a VP level or higher, with a “seat at the table”. To their downfall, many organizations settle for hiring a Marketing Director, or worse, a Manager or Coordinator. This immediately communicates to everyone in the organization that marketing is NOT a strategic function and is merely a support function. It’s not smart to refuse to invest in hiring the right people at the right level for your marketing team.

Whoever fulfills the role of senior marketer must drive development of the marketing objectives, strategies, and plans. Once developed, only then should the organization identify the resources – internal or external (agency) – needed to accomplish essential marketing tasks. Decide which skill sets are mission critical to your business and those form the core of the marketing organization. For fast-moving disciplines such as digital marketing, it may be more effective to hire an agency better structured to stay on top of trends and help educate the marketing team and other senior leaders.

Then decide if you want to hire to “marketing objective” or “marketing discipline”. Marketing objective requires hiring a Head of Lead Generation who is responsible for all areas of Lead Gen, and a Head of Customer Retention. Marketing discipline calls for a Head of Digital Marketing who assumes responsibility for all areas of digital marketing including lead gen, retention, etc. Both approaches can work but it depends on various factors including – the type of business, are the company’s sales concentrated in terms of target market, the balance between in-house employees and use of agencies and how deep is your organization’s need for specialization.

Need help building the right team or creating a brand that resonates with your target market(s)? The Bottomline Marketing gurus can help. Reach out to us online and let’s talk!